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If you've been puzzling over ways to get more oleic acid into your body, the USDA has just come through. In a joint venture with Oklahoma State University, the agency has released a brand-new peanut that's said to boast a richer flavor, health benefits, and resistance to crop disease, Modern Farmer reports. The new legume, a type of Spanish peanut, is called OLé and is the result of a sophisticated "pedigree methodology" that tapped into an "advanced breeding line" to create a peanut that would be more resistant to Sclerotinia blight and pod rot. The diseases can devastate peanut crops unless farmers resort to using fungicides, so from a financial standpoint, OLé could be a game changer; diseases like that in a peanut field's soil can wipe out up to half the crop, per a USDA press release.

"Growing a [disease-resistant] variety like the OLé could save farmers up to $150 [per] acre because they wouldn't have to use any chemicals, and that's big savings," a USDA research biologist tells the Crop Science Society of America. The new peanut is also good news from the consumer perspective: It's loaded with oleic acid—the same fatty acid found in olive oil—which doesn't turn rancid as quickly as the linoleic acid also found in peanuts, meaning a longer shelf life for peanut-based products. And oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid (one of the so-called "good" fats"), linked to lower blood pressure, better heart health, and decreased symptoms in diabetes patients, per the CSSA. The peanut's high oil content also lends it a nuttier flavor; Modern Farmer notes Spanish-style nuts are generally used to make "high-quality" peanut butter. (In an extremely rare case, a boy developed a peanut allergy in an odd way.)

Are you kidding me. STOP modifing mother nature. Having a daughter with a life threatening allergy to peanuts and having done ALOT of reading about this growing issue over the last 20 years ..... I am speachless. First off chances are the reason so many people are allergic and become allergic late in life has a dirrect collation to the very fact we have modifing the peanut for years. How about the USDA just make food safe and stop jacking with it. More resistant is just another way of saying Roundup Ready. Are we going to continue to modify this crop right to the point that it too is no longer a food, like cor. Read up on corn if you do not understand. Corn is now a pesticide. Sometimes just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD do it.